I’m gonna blather on about comics now, because I am my father’s son. Comics are quite good, actually, especially now. There are more talented writers than ever, and we’re starting to see more than just the same boring men writing comics. There are contemporary comics dealing with issues of identity, belonging, loss, hatred, and love, to the point where the medium can deliver stories of real value (and if you want to read some of those comics, consider taking Expressive Cultures: The Graphic Novel).

And then there’s this.

It’s a now-famous scene. Kyle Rayner (Green Lantern) has been fighting with the villain Major Force. He returns home to his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, only to find that Major Force has murdered her and stuffed her into a fridge. DeWitt was introduced in issue #48. She was killed 6 issues later. Her character only existed to provide some motivation for the main character, and to provide that motivation, she was gruesomely murdered by a C-tier villain. Six issues after that, Kyle Rayner starts a romance with Donna Troy (Wonder Girl/Darkstar/Troia/Wonder Woman/died once as well).

Needless to say, lots of people weren’t exactly thrilled with this. One of those people was Gail Simone. Simone has since gained fame for her work as a comics writer (she is, in my opinion, one of the greatest comics writers of her generation; in particular, her runs on Secret Six and Birds of Prey deserve praise), but she first became known for a website she made to document a disturbing trend in comics: women in refrigerators (content warning: this is a list of a lot of bad stuff that has happened to female characters. You can absolutely skip this link without missing anything).

With the exception of DeWitt, these women haven’t been literally put in refrigerators, but they have been murdered, tortured, depowered, or otherwise harmed for the edification of a male character or the majority-male audience. As Simone put it,

“Male superheroes ALSO get beat up, cut up, and killed up… however, it’s my feeling that a) the percentages are off. If there are only 50 major female superheroes, and 40 of them get killed/maimed/depowered, then that’s more significant numerically than if 40 male characters get killed, since there are many times more of them total.

And b) I can’t quite shake the feeling that male characters tend to die differently than female ones. The male characters seem to die nobly, as heroes, most often, whereas it’s not uncommon, as in Katma Tui’s case, for a male character to just come home and find her butchered in the kitchen. There are exceptions for both sexes, of course, but shock value seems to be a major motivator in the superchick deaths more often than not.

It got me to wondering, honestly, why it was OK, or even encouraged somewhat, to kill women, more than men, statistically.”

I love comics, and there have thankfully been major improvements with regard to writing non-cis-het-white-male characters in recent years (despite some notable missteps–seriously, who signed off on that). Still, the habit of killing off women just to make a male character sad for a few issues–which has since been dubbed “fridging”–is an especially pernicious bit of hacky writing that needs to die, just as all of Savage Dragon’s girlfriends did, or as Jean Grey did. 13 times. Not counting clones, alternate universes, or events in which half or more of the universe was destroyed.

See you all at practice,

Lev “you should read Bechdel’s Fun Home, it’s really good and doesn’t take that long to read” Bernstein

Secretary, Quiz Bowl at the Big Two, 1934-2009